F. H. Buckley: Beware the incredible “pain monsters” we’ve created at Yale and other schools

The interesting question is not whether the pain is real. Rather, the question is why we’re seeing more of it today than in the past. And the answer is because we’ve incentivized pain. We’ve let people know that pain, even idiotic, senseless pain, can be weaponized and employed against hated opponents, whether college teachers or local conservatives. And when you incentivize something, you get more of it.

The pain is real. But it is also strategic. What comes first is the desire to justify one’s hatred, for which the pain operates as a permission slip. It makes the protestor think his hatred noble, and lets him hug himself in self-delight for reveling in the most evil of emotions.

These grievances are personal and familial but — I speak from personal experience — it is so much easier, safer and more instantly satisfying to rail against The Man than the man.

Look at the Hollywood leftists who railed against Trump instead of Weinstein — in some cases, such as Ashley Judd — literally projecting their legitimate personal rage and resentment at a safer target…

Of course, there are just as many students who are being fashionably ignorant, who just “like to watch the world burn,” who are little Robespierres. But part of me pities the ones who are clearly (to me, not themselves) engaged in a kind of group EST therapy, that will be even less efficacious than the original. And of course, the rest of us have to watch it and in some cases, like Charles Murray et al. suffer for it.